Memory Blocks

The old brick synagogue on Orchard Street in New Haven, Connecticut is disintegrating. In the decade or so that the 60-odd families who make up Congregation Beth Israel have been trying to raise the $1.5 million it will cost to renovate the once-thriving Orthodox shul—or even the $300,000 it will take to make the most urgent repairs—the paint has continued to peel away from the soaring ceilings and the spidervein cracks along the stuccoed walls have widened into finger-width gaps.

The synagogue’s president, 87-year-old Sam Teitelman, remembers the congregation’s heyday—a time when the Oak Street neighborhood, just west of downtown, was essentially a Yiddish-speaking ghetto dotted with shtiebels, kosher lunch counters, and butcher shops like the one around the corner from Orchard Street that his father once ran after arriving in the United States in 1924. When Teitelman’s family—Ukrainian, by way of Cuba—moved farther west, to a nicer area, his father would trek back to the old neighborhood by foot each Shabbat to occupy seat No. 57. Today, the congregation no longer holds services, though prayer books sit out on the bimah in readiness for the occasional, and increasingly rare, weekday minyan. “Every one of our members is also a member somewhere else,” Teitelman said earlier this week. “We are never going to be a traditional Orthodox synagogue again.”

Orchard Street is one of only a handful of the immigrant-founded synagogues that once dotted cities across America to have remained in the hands of its congregation, rather than being demolished or sold and converted into, often, immigrant churches. Other survivors—the Eldridge Street Synagogue on New York’s Lower East Side or the Vilna Shul in Boston—have been reborn in recent years as cultural institutions. Teitelman’s hope is that the same might be possible for his shul. While the building’s fate remains in limbo, a group of artists from around the country has stepped in to create a “cultural heritage” exhibit of works inspired by the synagogue, or by its now-absent congregation, opening this weekend at the John Slade Ely House, an art space a few blocks from the shul. “It’s not up to us what becomes of this building—they have to figure out for themselves what they want,” said Cynthia Beth Rubin, a digital artist based in New Haven, who coordinated the project. “What we can do as artists is help them realize that the story of the shul touches people beyond their own community.”

The idea of using contemporary art to illuminate the relevance of deteriorating institutions isn’t new, but the New Haven project is about something else—using a deteriorating institution as a conduit for broader ideas about Jewishness, nostalgia, and the vast gulf separating contemporary American Jewish life from the quotidian realities our grandparents and great-grandparents knew. The charm of the Orchard Street shul lies in its ordinariness, but that also made it an almost perfect canvas for the two dozen or so participating artists—some Jewish, some not—to project their own notions of what it meant to be Jewish then or what we have lost with the disappearance of these congregations, places where restrooms were labeled with Yiddish signs reading “Menner” and “Froyen.”

The participating artists were required to visit the building, and to respect the values of the shul—no desecration of holy texts, for example, was allowed in their work—but were otherwise set free to make what they wanted: rich portraits of the synagogue’s interior and cemetery, audio interviews with congregants, a sukkah made from paper decorated with archival photographs. One team of Yale computer scientists contributed a digital recreation of the shul’s interior, made using the same techniques that have been used to model Michelangelo’s Florence Pieta, which could eventually be used as the basis for a virtual tour of the building. The results are, in many cases, beautiful, or heartbreaking—as in the case of a Shaimos box, intended for the disposal of religious texts, placed in front of the image of the shul’s disarrayed shelves of siddurim. The question left unanswered is: what should we save, and how?

Allison Hoffman is a senior editor at Tablet Magazine. Her Twitter feed is @allisont_dc.

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Duda’s arresting photograph of the Orchard Street building, taken in bright sunlight that warms its yellowish brick facade, makes it look new—but locked away behind a foreboding fence, unreachable. The artist noted in the catalogue that he initially planned to make the shot from across the street but decided to move to the sidewalk directly in front of the shul to avoid capturing the contemporary street scene, heightening the illusion of the past existing in the present.

Chen Xu and Holly Rushmeier, Orchard Street Shul Digitization Project

Rushmeier, a professor of computer science at Yale, worked on the IBM teams that used 3-D scanners to create digital images of Michelangelo’s Pieta and the throne of Tutankhamen. Her goal at Orchard Street was to create the basis for creating virtual tours of the building, but looked at the project as an experiment in scanning buildings—a still-incomplete process that leaves the images still looking toylike, or, in Rushmeier’s own words, “a little phony.”

As a graduate student, Rubin focused on Hebrew manuscripts—an element that pops up at the bottom of this image, an overlay of a contemporary photograph of the synagogue with architectural-type digital models of the building’s interior. The idea, she explained, is to bridge the gap between the Judaism of Eastern Europe—or at least our notion of Old World Talmudic piety—and the practices observed in the Orchard Street synagogue.

David Ottenstein, Orchard Street Shul, New Haven

One of the most striking aspects of the synagogue is its time-capsule quality; very little appears to have been updated or refurbished since the building’s opening, in 1925, including the collection of prayer books tucked into shelves in the sanctuary and downstairs in the function room. Ottenstein may have been looking for signs of entropy, but his black-and-white images of threadbare religious books also point to the long, slow decline of the congregation—to a time when there were still people who used them, but no one to pay for replacements or new bindings.

Roz Croog, Sukkah Beis Bayis

Croog, unlike the other artists in the show, came to the project with personal memories of the Orchard Street shul: as a girl, she attended services with her grandparents, usually sitting upstairs in the women’s balcony with her grandmother but sometimes creeping downstairs to sit among the men with her grandfather. Her photographs—digital images of the synagogue interior grafted onto pages from the Talmud—capture the fragmented nature of childish remembrances, and their association with the inscrutable, formal rituals of adult prayer.

Bruce Oren, Shawl

Several artists in the show photographed empty pews and cobwebbed corners of the synagogue to convey the absence of a congregation inside the Orchard Street sanctuary. Bruce Oren, a sculptor, went one step further and crafted an empty tallis, which hangs ominously from the ceiling. The metaphor, which extends only to the shrouded men who once prayed downstairs and leaves out the women who clustered in the balcony above, isn’t specific to Orchard Street—it could be about the loss of observance anywhere.

Julian Voloj, Remembrance Stones (Past)

Congregation Beth Israel has a section in New Haven’s Jewish cemetery, and the office in the basement of the Orchard Street building has a cemetery map rolled up on one wall that indicates who is buried in which plot, in careful, faded handwriting. Voloj, a photographer, made memorial stones, recalling the sort that Jews traditionally place on graves, affixed with images of deceased congregants and labeled with the Yiddish word for “remember”—a command that he explained extends beyond just Orchard Street to the entire generation of Eastern European immigrants it, and synagogues like it, served.

Daughters of a New Jerusalem, Leslie J. Klein

One of the eeriest pieces in the show is a dress and jacket made from fabric printed with archival images of the synagogue’s congregation and interior and stitched with a phalanx of pew seats. The dress is the only piece in the show to conjure up New Haven’s once-thriving garment industry, one of the city’s main draws for newly arrived Eastern European Jewish immigrants looking for work.

Mary Lesser, Sukkah

A Sukkah is supposed to symbolize a shelter in the wilderness—and Lesser’s delicate paper equivalent, decorated with photographs and handbills from New Haven’s Jewish historical archives, recalls America’s role as a refuge for Europe’s Jewish immigrants. But the greatest flaw of Orchard Street and other synagogues these newly arrived Jews built for themselves was their permanence, the one quality a sukkah lacks; the buildings may have been safe havens for worship, but they remained in place, immobile, while the neighborhoods around them gradually emptied out.

Jeanne Criscola, Florence Mednicow

Criscola profiled one member of the Orchard Street congregation, Florence Mednicow, through a collage of the woman’s personal photographs, invitations, household ledgers and other ephemera left to a niece after her death, at 91, in 1998. It’s a narrow window into who Mednicow was, and how she lived—either as a synagogue congregant or as a woman of her era—but it points to the vibrant lives lived in the sphere of the Orchard Street synagogue.